Month: January 2009

Someone’s been on my back about stopping part-way through a draft.

He’s right, but. Always finish a draft. Always. No exceptions.

Unless you can’t, in good conscience, finish.

If I didn’t know where I was headed, finishing a draft – riddled as it might be with with wrong turns, unresolved subplots and talking animals – would be essential to find out what the hell kind of story I was trying to write. Yes: an unfinished draft is an unfulfilled promise – a mere tease.

I know the story I want to tell. I know the characters. I know how it starts, and develops and – most importantly – how it ends. I can see it all, dammit. I just can’t write it.

No, that last one’s not true.

I can write it. I am writing it. But it’s hard.

Boo-frickin’-hoo, I hear you say, and I agree with you absolutely. Save it for therapy, or someone who gives a hoot.

Now keep writing.

There comes a point in a script where —

— you’ve outlined the story —

— you’ve done a scene breakdown —

— why, you even roughed out an 85-page working draft —

— but then you hit page 79 of your proper draft, you know you’ve another twenty or thirty pages to go, and all the voices you’ve been ignoring since page 47 just stop all of a sudden because –

  a.  admit it – you’re lost, and
  b.  you’re not adding value.

Now, there’s lost as in I was wondering how I was going to reach the second act out but my fingers seem to know the way and then there’s I’m making my characters walk and talk shit.

And as for adding value, there’s My characters are walking and talking shit but there’s something useful happening here, and then there’s This. Is. Going. Nowhere.

The word sanguine comes to mind – until i see that it actually means cheerfully optimistic.

Melancholic is more accurate, I suppose, but it just sounds so… down.

Hang on, my first instinct was right: sanguine, adj – eager to shed blood (archaic).

Yep.